BOW WAVE 625

Bow Wave Issue 625--Loose Belts Edition

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(c)2012 WavyLine.com	Issue No 625 29 Jan 12
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Lloyd's List Viewpoint
3. Book Review
4. Casualty of the Week
5. Does One's Faith in Essential Goodness of People No Good at All
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

Poem of the Week

(Recently the government of the United Kingdom has instituted a challenge to its own plethora of laws, labelling it a "Red Tape Challenge". It is of concern to note that some of the laws being challenged are the laws of navigation, in which it is proposed that some of them should be made less strict, or even repealed. Quite how any of the laws of navigation might be described as Red Tape is difficult to understand)

The Bell

The bell was tolled this morning for the perils of the sea, Stupidity and ignorance, as found in you and me,
And carelessness and arrogance, foolhardiness and worse, The sins of all humanity remain a heinous curse;
The disregard for nature’s constant ticking of the clock As we set a course directly for an uninviting rock. A mile in each four minutes means we alter course at two, To clear by less then half a mile, allowing slippage, too.

The bell was rung this morning for the laws which should protect us: By compliance, from the worst mistakes, they yet should resurrect us. These are the laws of nature and of physics and of speed, These well-known things, immutable by folly or by greed. Observance of them all is called for, prior to arrival. On passage, all compliance is the essence of survival, In pilotage upon the coast or on the ocean broad: Alternatively some might speak of falling on the sword.

The bell was rung this morning for the laws of navigation, Observed by every mariner of each United Nation.
The laws include a mercy for the man who gets it wrong. Let no man rush to judgment in his lust to earn a gong. But let us all remember that the laws have long been written By learned men of independence; tainted not, nor smitten. To tamper with those laws or even contemplate dilution Will see more lives upon the rocks of death and retribution.

Barry Youde 22nd January,2012

New Readers this week include:-

Ravi Jawani of the Fichte law firm in Dubai
Louis Shepherd of new HK lawyers Howse Williams Bowers Richard Revell of brokers Alston Gaylor
Capt. Ajay Mehrotra of Tropicana Minerals
Barry Youde-poet and lawyer

News of Readers

Ferdi Stoltzenberg and friends are organising a three day series of events in Hong Kong at the end of February called Shipping Hong Kong..

Details:-

http://www.amiando.com/shippinghongkong.html?page=531092

Readers Write

From Tony Munoz:-

Glen Paine, President, Maritime Industries Academy Foundation (MIAF) announced that the Steamship Trade Association of Baltimore Charitable Legacy, Inc. donated $10,000 to the MIAF non-profit charity, which was setup to support Baltimore’s only maritime high school. This maritime charity was founded by Mr. Mark Montgomery, CEO, Ports America Chesapeake, and Mr. Michael Angelos, President, Steamship Trade Association of Baltimore.

In a correspondence to Legacy Inc., Glen Paine said, "Since its inception in 2009, the Maritime Industries Academy Advisory Board and Foundation have assisted in the relocation of the MIA and the implementation of a maritime curriculum for ninth grade. It has also helped establish a Junior Naval Officer Training Corps and Honor Guard. The transformation of these young individuals over the last few years has been truly remarkable. They are learning skill sets that will help them achieve success in life."

The Maritime Industries Academy Foundation, Inc. (MIAF) mission is to continue the process of incorporating maritime oriented information within the curriculum of grades 9-12. By doing so, the students can see real-world application of their subjects. MIAF funding is critical to fulfilling this mission.

To learn more about MIAF, go to:-

http://www.baltimorecityschools.org/431

From George Grishin:-

I’ve decided to try my hand--sorry, my legs! at a skyscraper stairs jogging. It is for a good cause. The Charity Shelter, which helps homeless people, is arranging a charity run up to Level 42 of the former Nat West Tower in London:-

http://england.shelter.org.uk/what_you_can_do/events_and_challenges/vertical_rush

Please support me on March 1st -- and please support the charity with your donations. It’s quite easy, just click on the link below:-

https://www.justgiving.com/George-Grishin

See you at the top at Level 42 on 1st March?

Mailto:George@oakinsur.com

Note from the Editor

To the Dorchester Hotel we went this week to attend the proceedings of the 3rd Annual Marine Money London Ship Finance Forum. Something of a House of Pain in agreeable surroundings. For us the paper by John d'Acona, the Head of Research at Galbraith's stands out in memory. The presentation was entitled "Loosening the Belt after the Big Squeeze: Challenges for Shipping in the New World" and was quite a masterclass on how to see light at the end of the tunnel of 2012.

Enjoy!

2. Lloyd's List Viewpoint

Your editor's recent column in Lloyd's List contained reflections on the Costa Concordia casualty:-

A truth darker than fiction

Thursday 26 January 2012

INSURANCE people spend many hours of their working lives imagining the worst that can happen. Worst possible outcomes. Worst case scenarios. Worst expected losses.

25 years ago, you used your imagination to do this. Nowadays there are so many more things that can aid the imagination. A good broadband connection and decent research skills allow you to compare the worst you can imagine with what actually happens in the real world.

Costa Concordia is a good example of this. From my little office, effectively the office of a mere industry observer, I have seen underwater photographs of the ruptured hull, a slideshow of the evacuation and charts of the casualty area, along with AIS plots courtesy of this paper and expert opinion of all kinds, even mobile phone video captures.

Truly in the internet age there is little in marine casualty that might be described as reserved or in the private domain. The roiling of tweets, LinkedIn messages, Facebook postings and so forth have placed this large, tragic casualty on the hottest of story lists.

You have to live with the expectation that large marine casualties involving death and destruction will unwind in the glare of publicity Human error, which crops up in so many accidents large and small, is an inescapable part of the human condition. But it generates levels of emotion and volatility of almost sexual intensity.

Is the keeling over of Costa Concordia a worst case? In many respects it certainly is. It could, in other respects, have been far worse.

The potential for loss of life was certainly there on the night of the casualty. Evacuating an older than average collection of more or less well-to-do individuals at night from the crippled ship was no small feat of courage and organisation.

Certainly the insured loss is getting close to as high as you would imagine. The figures offered by people so far in press stories seem to me to be rather low. The hull claim, so my informants tell me, will be more like $700 million in the event of a total loss.

This might be enough to shove the whole global hull class into the red for 2012. The P&I claims will be very high if oil pollution, salvage difficulties or US litigation become part of the aftermath, which is easily imaginable. The insured loss might well exceed the previous worst posted by the Exxon Valdez.

Is public and political anger likely to compound the settlement? Again this does not seem unlikely.

Will the very public way that the cruise company pointed the finger at the master haunt it later? Yes. Exxon Valdez captain Joe Hazelwood ended up employed by his New York lawyers, Chalos and Brown, having endured a scourging that would test any man.I remember how insurance executives I knew at the time entreated and begged Exxon, on bended knee, not to cast the master adrift.

Are the insurers so far identified adequate to the task of dealing with the worst? There are marine insurers of bluest chip on the hull who will be able to hire the most competent specialists in the world to deal with the claim.

The Standard Club leads on P&I, something of a fortuity, I would say, for the cruise company, since the club has very strong Italian affiliations and strong background knowledge of the Italian maritime scene.

There are good linguists in the club, which also has a strong background in high-profile casualty handling. Standard Club dealt with the traumatic capsizing of Herald of Free Enterprise. The case handlers carried with them ever after the marks of people who had seen all too closely what can go wrong in shipping.

Worst cases do not often happen but when they do they change the landscape. You cannot move for the shutting of stable doors by regulators, insurers, suppliers and bankers. This has the effect of stripping capital and suspending disbelief and hope from the insurers.

It also leads to changes of emphasis. The stately progress of the EU’s Passenger Liability Directive will surge with urgency.

Andrew Chamberlain of HFW has suggested in this paper that the case of Costa Concordia is a Deepwater Horizon moment for cruiseships. If this is the case, the industry will have to adjust properly, in a grown-up way, to the phenomenal increase in ship sizes, to the rather poor preparedness around the world to deal with big ship disasters, salvage and to the skimpiness of premiums that have allowed large shipping organisations to cage their insurance costs.

For more than a week, shipping has risen on the world news and current affairs agenda. This unhappily demonstrates the tendency for shipping to rise up the agenda for all the wrong reasons. Those reasons are universal in people’s minds. The case of Concord Concordia features great human themes: hubris, fallibility in the works of man, the reactions of people involved in great events and misfortunes and how we deal with fear and manifest courage and funk.

I will not be the only one repelled by seeing Teflon Man in action among the highest ranks of cruise company management. The hour of tribulation came and they chose to point the finger or hide.

As we observe all too often in these difficult times, for this industry and many others, this is not leadership.

Sign up to the FREE Lloyd's List Daily News Bulletin at:

http://www.lloydslist.com/ll/email-alert.htm

3. Book Review

The Shipping Man--A Novel by Mathew McCleery, Published by Marine Money International (2011), ISBN: 978-0-9837163-0-3

Novels set in the world of merchant shipping are few and far between. When they appear they are sometimes tales of derring-do. As in how our hero springs an old rust bucket free from detention from some backwater racketeer. At other times we might expect to read a convoluted tale of salvage or piracy where our hero loses and regains his ship and his reputation, pausing only to retain the affection of the girl.

There is also the well worn narrative fiction written from the point of view of the man on deck (merchant marine division). The Shipping Man mostly eschews these formulae by concentrating on the dichotomy between money and ships, comparing and contrasting the shipping industry as we now find it, lolling in a slump after the longest boom in the sector since the late 18th Century, with the investment banking industry, not exactly everyone’s favorite walk of life since 2008.

And you have to say, the cynicism and misanthropy on display from the major characters in the book are pretty breathtaking. You could call what goes on in the story, charting the roller-coaster ride of Robert Fairchild, Wall Street fund person, and his adventures in shipping, quite a study in business cultures. The shipping characters are more simpatico than the investment bankers, but they are all meat eaters. Shipping Chutzpa plays and ultimately wins against Banker Swagger.

Who will enjoy this novel? Certainly the people who know something of shipping and investment will enjoy recognizing the world McCleery invents. Maybe the people who are married to these very same people would benefit from this introduction to the business. This reviewer used to come and go from home and a family which had very little idea of what went on in mutual marine insurance. Returning at night, the wife would say to our daughters "here comes our father, which art in shipping". The story of the shipping man is gripping enough and accessible enough for Joe Public, provided Joe Ordinary wants to know how shipping works. The wife got as far as page 228 before being overwhelmed by technicalities. This reviewer, no banker he, read the book in only two sittings. The book certainly has pace. Its hero , Robert Fairchild spends most of the story on the edge of ruin, sort of burnt out on too much fear and greed, bouncing between a Janus-like Greek called Spyro and Coco, a multicultural Norwegian tanker owner.

Late on in the novel Fairchild asks and answers the right question. To quote: What was it about the international shipping industry that was so appealing?...Was it the age-old romance of ships and the sea that had been attracting and exciting men throughout history? Was it the fact that the maritime industry still valued traditions and relationships when so many other businesses didn’t? Was it because the industry was populated by larger-than-life characters and not soulless corporations?

All of us who have been drawn into this world know the answer to this. The publishers are to be congratulated for having the imagination and moxy to give flight to Mathew McCleery’s novelistic fancy. It deserves to do well and to serve long on the short shelf of memorable shipping fiction.

[This review appeared in the last edition of Freshly Minted, the weekly webzine of Marine Money]

4. Casualty of the Week

Courtesy of Sophie Ignarski,currently residing nearby, we first hear of the strange casualty in Kentucky where a high tech shuttle operation collided with a road bridge of long standing. According to the admirable gCaptain's news service:-

The 312-foot long and 8,000 horsepower M/V Delta Mariner, owned and operated by Foss Maritime, is used to carry Boeing rocket components, including rocket booster cores, for the Boeing Delta IV rocket program. The versatile vessel is designed to navigate shallow inland waterways as well as the open ocean, and generally hauls rocket components approximately 550 miles from the Boeing factory in Decatur, Alabama down the Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway to the Gulf of Mexico, according to Foss’ website.

State officials say that the bridge, formally the Eggner’s Ferry Bridge, was designed so that if it were struck that only portions of the structure would fail. Inspectors estimate the gap in the bridge to be approximately 300 feet wide.

Full gCaptain story here:-

http://tinyurl.com/6rhubls

Daily Mail story below. Spot the difference.

http://tinyurl.com/7crakt3

5. Does One's Faith in Essential Goodness of People No Good at All

This story of fraudsters in Hungary seeking to make a death claim on the Costa Concordia helps explain why claims managers customarily have a hard boiled quality about their otherwise sweet-natured persons.

http://tinyurl.com/6ucc6rf

6. And Finally...

John A.C.Cartner has sent in this news of pioneering thinking in the Royal Navy. Since war is against the law, providing for alternative uses of naval craft shows real thinking outside the box:-

The Royal Navy is proud of its new fleet of Type 45 destroyers. Having initially named the first two ships HMS Daring and HMS Dauntless, the Naming Committee has, after intensive pressure from Brussels, renamed them HMS Cautious and HMS Prudence. The next five ships are to be named HMS Empathy, HMS Circumspect, HMS Nervous, HMS Timorous and HMS Apologist.

Costing £850 million each, they meet the needs of the 21st century and comply with the very latest employment, equality, health & safety and human rights laws. The new user-friendly crow's nest comes equipped with wheelchair access. Live ammunition has been replaced with paint balls to reduce the risk of anyone getting hurt and to cut down on the number of compensation claims. Stress counselors and lawyers will be on duty 24hrs a day and each ship will have its on-board industrial tribunal. The crew will be 50/50 men and women, and balanced in accordance with the latest Home Office directives on race, gender, sexuality and disability. Sailors will only have to work a maximum of 37hrs per week in line w ith Brussels Health & Safety rules, even in wartime! All the vessels will come equipped with a maternity ward and nursery, situated on the same deck as the Gay Disco. Tobacco will be banned throughout the ship, but cannabis will be allowed in the wardroom and messes. The Royal Navy is eager to shed its traditional reputation for; "Rum, sodomy and the lash"; so out has gone the occasional rum ration which is to be replaced by sparkling water. Although sodomy remains, it has now been extended to include all ratings under 18. The lash will still be available but only on request. Condoms can be obtained from the Bosun in a variety of flavors, except Capstan Full Strength. Noone wishes to encourage smoking in any way.

Saluting officers has been abolished because it is deemed elitist and is to be replaced by the more informal, "Hello Sailor". All information on notices boards will be printed in 37 different languages and Braille. Crew members will now no longer be required to ask permission to grow beards or mustaches - this applies equally to women crew members. The MoD is working on a new "non-specific" flag because the White Ensign is considered to be offensive to minorities. The Union Flag had already been discarded.

The newly re-named HMS Cautious is due to be commissioned soon in a ceremony conducted by Captain Hook from the Finsbury Park Mosque who will break a petrol bomb over the hull. She will gently slide into the water as the Royal Marines Band plays "In the Navy" by the Village People. Her first deployment will be to escort boat loads of illegal immigrants aross the channel to ports on England 's south coast.

The Prime Minister said, "While these ships reflect the very latest in modern thinking, they are also capable of being up-graded to comply with any new legislation coming out of Brussels ."

His final words were, "Britannia waives the rules".

P.S. Merci Paul Dixon

Morris, an 82-year-old man, went to the doctor to get a physical.

A few days later the doctor saw Morris walking down the street with a gorgeous young lady on his arm.

A couple of days later the doctor spoke to the man and said, "You're really doing great, aren't you?"

Morris replied, "Just doing what you said, Doctor:"Get a hot mamma and be cheerful. "

The doctor said, "I didn't say that. I said you got a heart murmur and be careful."

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